Google announces important changes

Google has announced that from April 21 mobile-friendliness of a website will become much more important in the SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages).

The most important vision of Google on any website is: is this website designed and developed with the visitor in mind? Google regards the users of their search engine as clients and they want to serve their clients as good as possible. Therefor they have a preference of showing websites in their SERP's that are user friendly.

Since more and more of the visitors to a website use a mobile device to surf the internet (in some cases up to 40 % of all visitors), it has become evident that a website that is not mobile friendly will be regarded as less interesting by Google.
The nickname of this Google update is Mobilegeddon. Analyst think that a lot of sites that are not mobile friendly will lose position in the search results. This should be a good incentive to get your website mobile friendly.

What is a Mobile Friendly Website?

A mobile-friendly website is one that displays correctly and looks nice on hand-held devices.
It should load fast, be easy to read, easy to navigate and minimize scrolling through it. Last but not least: it should avoid Flash, because Apple (one of the biggest suppliers of handheld devices with the IPad and the IPhone) does not support Flash.

If you already have a normal website, it is a good idea to start considering having a mobile version done. Most websites will work on a mobile device but will be a miniature version of the desktop one. An easy to use mobile version changes the template of the website according to the size of the screen.

Bootstrap Framework

At Studio la Brame, we use the Bootstrap Framework to create a so called "fluid grid layout" for mobile versions. This means that the website adjusts fluidly to the size of the screen on which you look at it. In other words: the design is responsive.

The big advantage of the bootstrap framework is that this responsiveness that it creates is quite easy to achieve, because the framework is partly pre-coded. So the developer doesn't need to do a lot of coding on the website. Furthermore: the database doesn't need to be touched in order to make the site responsive. So all that needs to be done is to change the template and some aspects of the design of your website. 

So, you don't need a new website, but only a new or adjusted template. 

To Bootstrap or not to Bootstrap? That is an important question.

It is unknown yet what the implications of the new Google update will be for individual clients on the short term. We can be reasonably sure that in the near future a mobile friendly site is imperative to hold you position within Google.

A word of advice? You will need to know if your site is regarded as mobile friendly by Google. If not, you should consider having your design updated for mobile use. This becomes even more important if you have a lot of visitors to your website using a mobile device. You can find this information in your Google Analytics account under "audience – mobile – overview".